A style of hand railing, used both indoors and outdoors, residential and commercial, uses wire rope as the balusters. This style is commonly referred to as “Cable Railing”. This type of railing may also be referred to as “cable infill” as opposed to “baluster infill”. The wire rope may create vertical or horizontal balusters. The horizontal design being far more common. The primary advantage of cable railing is a less obstructed view. Since the diameter of the cable is relatively small, it provides for an open view through the railing. The less obstructed view is particularly desirable if the surrounding area is a scenic view. There is another significant advantage of the cable railing system. The cable and cable termination fittings are generally made of stainless steel and are relatively maintenance free. This avoids the task of periodically painting conventional balusters. With a cable railing system, only the posts would need to be painted. The cable railing in a given location may also be considered more attractive than balusters. There are many combinations of railing styles, post styles, and cable fitting styles used to produce a given cable railing system.
A disadvantage of existing cable railing systems is cost. In general, cable railing systems cost significantly more than the conventional baluster systems. For many applications cable railing would be the more desirable system. However, the high cost discourages its use. The major cause of the relatively high cost is the cost of the cable termination fittings. Each cable has two ends that must have a cable termination fitting. Each section of a railing requires approximately nine to twelve cables. These fittings are required to attach and/or tighten the cable to an anchor point. The anchor point is usually a stationary post but may also be any suitable structure such as a wall of a building.
There are many different types of termination fittings. Two major groups of fittings are defined by the way in which they grip the cable. These two types could be referred to as swage fittings and swageless fittings. For swage fittings, the cable is inserted into the center of a tubular section of the fitting. A tool compresses or swages the tubular section to the cable. Swageless fittings have an outer tubular piece with a tapered wall in the internal bore. A plurality of wedges, that fit between the internal bore and the cable, clamp onto the cable. The grip of the wedge prevents the cable from slipping out of the swageless fitting.
The swage fittings are smaller, simpler, and less expensive. Swaging tools are required. If a mistake is made, the fitting cannot be reused once it has been swaged. Swageless fittings are larger, more complex and more expensive. Swageless fittings require no tools if they are of the spring type and only require common wrenches if they are of the threaded compression type. Swageless fittings may be disconnected from the cable and reused if a mistake is made. Examples of the swageless fitting type are Scotti U.S. Pat. No. 4,627,762 (1986) and Toimil U.S. Pat. No. 7,043,801 (2006)
Every cable run must have a tensioning fitting on at least one end of the cable. In general tensioning devices are large and consist of many components. The swageless design makes them even larger and increases the number of components. This makes them expensive and unsightly. Existing cable termination fittings have a varying degree of exposure outside of the posts. With few exceptions every existing type of cable termination has an undesirable visual exposure on one or both sides of the post. Often this exposure is very large. An example of a typical large fitting with many parts is Striebel & Striebel U.S. Pat. No. 7,198,253 (2007), see FIG. 5. A main feature of the cable railing system is to reduce the obstruction of the view by the railing hardware to a minimum. Large exposed cable termination hardware diminishes this objective.